The longest strike in South African history, namely five months has come to an end. There were no winners as the workers will have to work up to five years to make up lost pay under the no work no pay principle and the mines were brought to their knees as there was no spike in the platinum and other related metal prices.
The newest entry is always found at the bottom of the index above. The rest of this article is beneath Alerts and Notes.
ALERT 22/7/2014
It seems as if there is going to be an over supply of COAL in the not too distant future world wide. At the moment ,there is a shortage of coal at our electricity company ,namely ESCOM perhaps not the time to rush into buying coal mining shares!
ALERT 10/7/2014
Gold has made a comeback in the last couple of days, much against a the consensus that it will continue to wane. Nervousness about the future of stock markets as they have out performed the actual recovery as well as slowing growth in Europe's main driver Germany as well as major trouble in Iraq, Syria, Ukraine and over production in China is unsettling the markets, also the firing of indiscriminate rockets into Israel from Gaza that can only be stopped by a ground invasion.
NOTE 5. FINAL WINTER UPDATE NOW IN PLACE July 28
Note 4.Spring share and derivative update is now in place 21/7/2014 see also preliminary SUMMER LIST 23/7
NOTE 3 My specialist watch list parts A,B,C have been updated see above 14/7/2014
NOTE 2 Small caps summer list has been updated see above 25/7/2014
Note 1.See the relaunched Resources News on page 3 for my reasons for choosing AMPLATS to recover best from the platinum strike above on 3/7/2014
Despite the return to work and hefty increases for entry level miners (20% plus),the mines will not be able to carry as usual on if there is not a significant increase in metal prices soon ,an unlikely event ( Read the recent posts on the strikes as well to fully understand why)
A fact not often written about is that hungry striking miners on some mines opened old ventilation shafts and old entrances to tunnels and stripped the mines of miles of electrical copper cables and iron pipes to sell illegally on the black market to gain money to pay for food to survive the strikes as well. All will have to be replaced now at high prices before mining can safely commence again. Contractors are now being payed off which cause a ripple effect on the economy and as miners retire etc they are not being replaced.
A great deal has been written about mechanizing the mines. This is not always feasible for many of the mines as there narrow ore bodies very deep down. The most likely result is that most of the older mines will close down permanently.
Amplats and the other miners will also probably sell off the deeper mines and go for the opencast option ,as that is the only way they will be able to mechanise.
There is unlikely to be a strike on this scale in the future, which has almost forced our country back into a recession again. Since we pride ourselves on being democratic, the minister of mines is now mulling over legislation that will make it illegal to strike unless a strike ballot is held and sixty percent of the workers approve it. There after further supervised strike ballots must be held say every four weeks. Security will also be beefed up during such an action so as to allow non striking unions members to work with out the danger of being killed. This present strike was called by the union boss and then he used strong arm tactics to enforce it.
SEE ALSO MY MOST POPULAR POST OF 1 MARCH 2012
MENTIONED IN THE SIDE BAR NAMELY The stripping of South African Resource Assets part 1.As this foretold of the events of the present period!
